Don Quixote tilting against windmills on the long-suffering Rosinante,
trying to save damsels in distress from imaginary ogres; or me jousting
with an exclusive environment on my battered wheelchair to try and give
people with disabilities a fighting chance. Who is crazier?

Wednesday, 17 February 2016

A beautiful place with ugly values

I am going to indulge in yet another bout of New Zealand bashing. Earlier, I had posted two accounts of how, flying completely against all available evidence, the medical assessors of that country had denied me a visitor visa for two weeks solely on the grounds that I had multiple sclerosis and was likely to be a strain on their medical services and finances - in spite of my assuring them that I would have insurance and even if the insurance company refused to foot the bill for pre-existing conditions, I had provided them enough evidence of solvency to show that I could pay for whatever damages were incurred!

And today, I find (on facebook) that the medical assessors have been up to their tricks yet again - this time to deny a residency status to a young son of a mathematician, who has already been on the faculty of the University of Auckland for some four years, because the son had autism! Never mind that the father was a respected member of the math dept there and had even been recipient of a handsome grant! The Vice- Chancellor of the university is quoted by The Guardian as saying he was was “an example of the outstanding young academics we must have at the University of Auckland if we are to maintain our premier world ranking”. Meanwhile, this mathematician reportedly had the good sense to say “I do not see myself raising my children in a country that does not respect the UN convention on human rights.” According to the president of the New Zealand Mathematics Society, the departure of “an outstanding mathematician” would be “a great loss for us and New Zealand”.

And this country is supposed to have been a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability since early 2007! Do such grandiose commitments to a better tomorrow have no meaning? Should there not be a penalty levied on such obvious defaulters? The Guardian article cited above goes on, by the way, to say `In the year 2014/2015, Immigration New Zealand declined 116 residency applications solely on medical grounds.

The disability rights commissioner, Paul Gibson, was not available for comment.' (I wonder how many of those 116 were persons with some manner of disability!)

This country seems to be blessed with a natural beauty that makes you go `Ooh' and `Aah'; but cursed with a Government whose human values make you go `sick' and `yecch'.

The Indian Government, also a signatory to the UNCRPD, is also threatening to go the Kiwi way by removing diseases like MS and Autism from the ambit of the `India-specific' clone of the UNCRPD Bill (called the RPDB) about which, also, I have bored to death the long suffering reader of this blog. I can only pray that my country, which claims centuries of a humanitarian civilisation, retains its humanity!

1 comment:

This is an awful story! How did it resolve? I had a friend who took a special needs child to New Zealand some years ago and she felt that there services and attitudes were more welcoming than in the USA! New Zealand's welcome has changed drastically or they are picking and choosing who they accommodate. Perhaps racism is also at play? My friend and her child were light skinned.

About Me

I am a professor of mathematics at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai (India). I have been increasingly mobility challenged of late due to the onset of a neurological condition known as multiple sclerosis; and perforce, I have had to notice the different ways that society excludes people like me, not deliberately, but for want of consciously thinking of the need for a more inclusive and accessible society.
Most of the posts here are a reproduction of articles from a column called `Different Strokes for Different Folks' which I wrote in the Times of India for a little more than a year from August 2011 until the powers that be decided that there were more pressing matters to be discussed on their pages.
I've written a bit more in the post 'Genesis of the Blog', which explains how this blog came into being.